Is screen addiction actually rotting our brains?

Thread for discussion about posting studies showing effects of excess screen time on the brain, discussing your own experience with it, things you've done to reduce screen time, or even arguing the opposite position.

How does excess time materially affect our mental faculties?

I've noticed a pronounced change with smart phones as opposed to the computer, but just curious about the group feeling before I get in detail

Yes.

Lock thread

sorry, I was going to write an answer but I have the four apps to flip between and it looked like too much bother, and actually I'm supposed to be working and shouldn't be on my phone anyway

yes

yes

yes

i've been staring at computer screens since i was a young child and my brain is completely cooked

No? Not from what I've read on social media.

my attention span is

wait what was I doing

The only way out is through.

yes. intelligence and cognitive ability are embodied and developed in physical space among other humans. too much screen time dims those things accordingly.

ewww are you implying that I have to go out and talk to people face to face???


jk, I love doing this, I'm just bad at making myself do it for some reason

my brain is more active and thoughtful than ever, which i mostly credit to the presence of estrogen, but i do try to spend significant time away from phone and computer. rarely works

yes

yes

yes

It not only rots brains w/r/t analog activities like reading, problem solving, creativity, socializing, it even (imo) makes us worse at the digital ones we used to use a computer for. Even blogs and social media and ranked lists and shit!

when was the last time you were watching a movie or show, with other people, in a theater, and somebody didn't pull out their phone halfway through?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGHUT_T0wuE

society is in the gutter.

no

when was the last time you were watching a movie or show, with other people, in a theater, and somebody didn't pull out their phone halfway through?

― 龜, Monday, July 6, 2026 4:52 PM (three minutes ago)

At home, though, my wife can't leave the phone alone for a 20-minute sitcom episode, and it drives me crazy.

this thing is way overpriced for what it is but it's been very helpful to me

Brick — Take Back Control of Your Screen Time – Brick LLC https://share.google/9iWabi3Mbx3LTk9IC

The trick is to go to a show before 11 a.m. You'll have the theater to yourself, so you can pull out your phone. Or not. It doesn't matter.

Someone pulling out a phone in cinema is still a notable exception for me - so much so I even remember the last time, it was at the Barbie film.

Went to the cinema two days ago (The Invite) and nobody took out their phone.

I guess there is also the subgenre of taking the phone out specifically to film the screen, has happened to me at bollywood stuff and a Wong Kar Wai rep screening.

I was walking behind a young dude yesterday (maybe early 20s) and he had his phone in his back pocket and he reached back there probably ten times in a city block, and patted it just to confirm it was there

The wife and kid both have ADHD and the search for scrolling dopamine hits is constant.

“You know, [wife who I love dearly and often has insomnia], they say that being on a screen right before bed makes sleep more difficult.”

“Huh…” scroll scroll scroll

She used to CONSTANTLY send me “interesting” things that she found on Instagram and I stopped looking at them and eventually quit the app. I do all the cooking and she’ll request a dish.

“Where’s the recipe?”
“Instagram.”
“I can’t see that and I don’t want to see that.”
“I typed it out!”

Looking at the recipe, it’s all fucked up with no measurements or whatever because Instagram often doesn’t have such information. So I google the name of the dish and countless actual recipes pop up. I have gently pointed out that she can simply browse recipes online or look in our many, many cookbooks that she continues to buy. And yet the thrill of finding a small reward in the river of algorithm keeps her going like a slot machine junky.

The older kid with a smart phone reads less, makes less art, and has a hard time making it through a movie. Just getting her to disengage with it is hard. We were in NYC for the first time and we’re walking around. She’s on her phone texting people (or gramming or whatever) that we are walking around NYC.

There is an intolerance to dead air, leaving no space for being with one’s thoughts.

I was walking behind a young dude yesterday (maybe early 20s) and he had his phone in his back pocket and he reached back there probably ten times in a city block, and patted it just to confirm it was there

― Andy the Grasshopper

I pat my ass because (a) I'm notorious for leaving my phone in bookstores, bars, libraries, restaurants, homes (b) I like my ass.

I agree with the other people who say it hasn't affected them as much as others.

I don't

I should bitch about myself too. That last point definitely applies to me as well. While I’ve cut out most social media, the ones I’ve stuck with I refresh often.

I know so much of it is generational. I have read physical books my entire life, the pleasure they give me is engrained. It’s easy for me to make space for that. Still, the unread books pile up. If only I read books as often as I read ILX.

The last point being an intolerance for boredom.

If I was specific about how much online Scrabble I played this weekend, you'd suggest treatment--Lost Weekend-level. And it does have a very negative effect on everyday life; generally takes me a day to re-engage with the world.

I should bitch about myself too. That last point definitely applies to me as well.

i'm absolutely at my stupidest but i don't gaf lol.

I badly need to cut down, but living alone and travelling alone a little and working from home makes the old internet quite compelling.

Have tried to just actively read and ignore my phone for longer with positive results.

Germane

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2026/jul/06/the-one-change-that-worked-i-banned-myself-from-social-media-and-my-children-have-never-been-happier

It’s hard to say if I’m more calm/happy/grounded when I’m not looking at screens or if I’m less likely to look at screens when I’m happy/calm/grounded (bc compulsive screen use is definitely a way of coping with - though not to say helping - emotional discomfort.

But yes. Yes.

interestingly we have watched almost zero television since moving to an island, we used to do an hour a night at least.

maybe once our bandwidth improves we will watch more, but I don't see it happening.

i can't remember

I don't mind using the computer/phone as long as I'm actively choosing what I'm doing (my job and several hobbies require it), but I do go to reddit many times a day when I'm waiting for my son to change clothes or waiting for a build to finish at my job. Always like 2-10 minutes. I've curated it enough that it aligns with my interests, but it's ultimately overloading my brain with things that don't improve my life and are forgotten by the end of the day. I removed it from my home screen and really tried not to use it but found it unbearable to sit and do nothing in those 2-10 minute periods. So I'm back to using it and slightly depressed about confirming my addiction and inability to handle boredom

screen addiction has so rotted my brain that i don’t even care about any studies about it or what they prove, i already know

when i was a kid i was very smart and quick and my memory was crazy good, and i prayed to god to make me “normal” so that cool and taller kids wouldn’t make fun me of me as much, and then god was like “ok buddy” and 40 years later i can’t tell a coca cola from a coconut

I read some of the shit i wrote 10 years ago and it was much better structured and flowed logically.

I can't get out of intense editing mode now because screen time accelerated my OCD which makes me rewrite shit so much that some of my work emails have recently taken me an hour

last night I was trying to read a magazine article and but I was super tired and so just stared at my phone for awhile... I hate that I consider that some kind of 'reward' (for nothing) but that's how my brain is wired to view it

even audiobooks when driving --- i enjoy them more than podcasts, but the chatty podcast format is easier to follow so i listen.

is how i break it down to a certain extent

iykyk

The writing on the little card at art galleries is some of the worst, most clichéd, inward-looking jargon in existence in any field of work. It also has broken out of its cage a little bit so you see it elsewhere.

local garda frames his practice as an interrogation of the decolonised subject in a post-subaltern east london pub

interrogating the certainties and uncertainties of liminality while contesting the nature or "unnature" of the space itself

it has always seemed crazy to me that art schools dont routinely offer some kind of a basic "writing for artists" course, being able to communicate coherently about your work seems like an important skill for artists and only about .00001% seem to have any idea how to do it

sort of agree but then also wonder if the point is to just never say anything anyone could understand and never move away from the accepted cliches

I don’t know about art schools, but in masters programs you’re expected to write a thesis and present a final project. I think most people come out of it as better writers and more able to articulate their work. But there is so much art speak and it blends in with therapy speak and sometimes poorly understood science speak, and it really is like herding cats.

Labels should not be written by artists unless it’s a little group show at the local nonprofit art space. In big institutions a curator who often has a PHD is writing or signing off on text.

In most major museums I don’t think it’s too bad, and only in about 30% of galleries at this point. I guess I mean to say that this trend has lessened a lot in the past few years, from my ken going to galleries large and small on the east and west coasts of the US

sort of agree but then also wonder if the point is to just never say anything anyone could understand and never move away from the accepted cliches

― LocalGarda, Saturday, July 11, 2026 4:17 PM (four hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

In some cases the wall text is definitely the fog machine for the artist’s intellectual glam rock

otm

I’ve been thinking about it as I’ve been visiting several museums and galleries while travelling.

- Putting away my phone (well, turning it on airplane mode, setting it to greyscale, turning brightness to minimum, and putting it in a different pocket than usual) does help, though not dramatically.

- I went to a museum with very few labels for individual works, just short texts for certain rooms. This was waaaay more enjoyable and engaging than trying to cram in immediately-forgotten details before glancing at a work. Granted, this obv works better for some things than others: most of the work I’ve been most affected by and studied have been possible because I got textual context cues from wall texts.

- What museums are y’all going to with indecipherable academic texts? This sounds like “rude record store clerk” syndrome (the cliche is everywhere, but I’ve never really seen it). Ok, this is true at private galleries and some contemporary art galleries, but most places I’ve been to (museums, at least) have pretty accessible texts. That said, today I went to a small contemporary art gallery that had a standard undergrad-level text about the exhibition, alongside one in plain language, which I think is a great idea I’d like to see more of.

I deleted instagram and reddit two weeks ago, the last social media apps I had. The first week I was still compulsively picking up my phone at random times and that physical act felt like an addiction kicking in. This week less so. My attention span is still pretty messed up but I have been reading more, trying to occasionally leave the house without headphones and so on. More and more, I was actively feeling it and I now feel I have actively fight back.

trying to occasionally leave the house without headphones and so on

woah woah woah woah woah

I keep hearing about people having experiences involving other people. Supposedly that occasionally happens if you dont close yourself off listening to avant garde jazz when you go outside.

Big if..

Last night my FYP showed me a video by someone who likes to visit lighthouses. In the comments, someone said that their great-great-grandfather was a lighthouse keeper and raised a family in a MI lighthouse that is now a museum. I said, "Oh bet, where was that, because my hometown has a lighthouse that is now a museum." Answer: It was the same place! A very charming coincidence esp bc I had photos of touring that museum that I could share.

Just a lil bit of whimsy to add to the convo. I promise I also go outside and experience other people (not today though).

I deleted instagram and reddit two weeks ago, the last social media apps I had. The first week I was still compulsively picking up my phone at random times and that physical act felt like an addiction kicking in. This week less so. My attention span is still pretty messed up but I have been reading more, trying to occasionally leave the house without headphones and so on. More and more, I was actively feeling it and I now feel I have actively fight back.

― a hoy hoy, Friday, July 17, 2026 9:04 AM (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

the physical act stuff is not unlike smoking in that regard

Yup. I sometimes grab my phone and then set it down again because I realised I'm watching a film/listening to music/doing something else I should be focusing on. Ofc probably there are more instances where I keep going.

I've been taking the elevator down at work lately instead the stairs because of a knee issue and nearly every time I step in the elevator I pull out my phone even though I can't get any service in the elevator.

I instinctively take out my phone whenever I'm finished with some task or just moving from one place to another, it's annoying. I don't give myself any free time.

it's become a way to move time faster for me.

have to fight the urge at traffic lights

My Instagram feed has become 1/2 clips from tv and movies… but excerpted differently… like, in the past week I have seen 3 different edits of the Key & Peele sketch with the rapper interrogated for murder and the “put your hands in the air if…” sketch. I feel like sketch comedy is a good formal use of “the feed”… scrolling substack feels a bit more edifying but there’s enough fluff that it still feels rotten.

I recently got a stylus for my ipad so I could physically write things and draw, as opposed to saying “oh I should get off the screen and do that… “ and then not do that.

I keep hearing about people having experiences involving other people. Supposedly that occasionally happens if you dont close yourself off listening to avant garde jazz when you go outside.

don’t want to risk it

My great fortune and saving grace is that I have never found it comfortable to do anything on a smartphone. I don’t know if my hands are too big or my eyes are too bad or what, but I can only stand interfacing with my phone for a few minutes at a time before I want to throw it into a fireplace. I’m your frustrating friend who asks you to email the Youtube / Facebook / whatever link you just texted. Sometimes I’m embarrassed to ask, so if it seems like a link that might actually be worth opening (it’s usually 50/50, depending on the sender), I will c+p the link and email it to myself.

If this all sounds somehow virtuous, I should mention that between scrolling Twitter, reading record reviews, compulsively watching eBay auctions, doing work-related stuff, checking emails, checking message boards (hi!), personal banking, and moving hi-hats around on Logic (which is my idea of fun), I am probably in front of my Macbook for 75% of my waking hours. I wish it weren’t so, and I know it has had a negative effect on both my mental and physcial health. I still read an above average (I think) number of books, but I’m usually only reading them for an hour or two before bed (or in the bathroom).

Also, I’m not sure we’re really meant to meet endless numbers of new people all the time, it winds up being a thing where the more people you connect with, the fewer people you really know. And the thing with social media is we remain connected with people in an almost unnatural way, it’s probably not too cynical to suggest that there are people we were meant to have fade away and be forgotten. And we were meant to be the same to others. I told the story once here about how a few years ago someone I hadn’t seen since fifth grade reconnected with me and wanted to meet up, so I did and it was just the strangest and most unnatural social experience I’ve had. Not just awkward because it was someone I hadn’t seen in a while, but it was someone who had been completely erased from my memory, and I spent the entire time hanging out with them trying to remember something, anything about them.
― omar little, Thursday, July 9, 2026 5:15 PM (one week ago) bookmarkflaglink

This post really resonates. I think someone - maybe Douglas Rushkoff? wrote a bit about this phenomenon, basically about the unnaturalness of meeting someone at a bar once in 2008 and friending them on Facebook and now, two decades later, you are staring at a screen watching their child, who you’ve never met and never will meet, get their driver’s license or graduate high school, and how strange that is

I quit facebook and instagram but held onto bluesky and reddit. I think I’m going to ditch reddit. I don’t know if I’m using it wrong, but I see the same dumbass questions over and over. I joined a turntable group and 96% of the posts are images of bent-ass styluses with people asking “is my stylus bent?”

damn, nice omar post there, resonates with me too.

gonna be the one who says that this didn’t resonate with me at all— but part of that probably has to do with my being connected with a lot of people i have never met irl, or only met a few times. i think this is true of a lot of people in the art and writing world generally.

a nice counter-example: met a guy in 2006 when he was road managing a band i had booked, we then hung out a few times in the bay area circa 2009-2010, then he moved to NY and i didn’t see him for years. we would stay in touch and follow each other’s doings but never saw each other. then i gave a reading in 2023 at a fancy art gallery, and he came because he saw my name on the bill! we had a great conversation afterwards, catching up on stuff that had happened in the intervening decade and a half.

so for me, the random person from the past can be someone who is interested and interesting, and is worth keeping around and staying connected to.

it can also be some dude from middle school whom you haven’t thought about in many years, and it is this latter category that actually evidences the wisdom of culling friends lists and connections. lord knows i have.

i guess this is my way of saying that the random dude from the bar often ends up being a connection i want to keep over the person i was friends with when we were kids, because the random person from the bar is someone i might actually have something in common with.

like, i look up people i was friends with in middle and high school and we have literally nothing in common except having skin.

I had an hour-long phone call yesterday with a guy I haven't been in the same room with in 25 years. (I had emailed him, and he had a 10-hour drive from California to New Mexico ahead of him, so he called.)

I think "people I went to middle school with" and "person I met at a bar once" are basically the same level of random, middle school is so far away that connections from that time are de facto dudes I met at a bar once in terms of actual familiarity.

If I can actually remember the name of “person I met a bar once” that indicates a better connection than the mean girls I grew up with whom I have no desire to reconnect with.

Lots of false conclusions here imo. You can be happy for someone you met once in a bar, because they live a good life and you get a tiny window on it, if you want to peek in. Or you can, for yourself, decide that in your limited time and social battery, you're going to focus on 5 good friends to make sure you have enough time & energy to give them. It's all YOUR CHOICE. Do what you want. None of it is inevitable, good lord. Just do you what you want and stop trying to make up pseudo psychological or scientific rationalizations for it.

https://i.ibb.co/mCnbMMH1/Screenshot-2026-07-18-at-6-39-42-PM.png

https://i.ibb.co/Vp9Tx23p/Screenshot-2026-07-18-at-6-39-50-PM.png

I value my childhood friends as a source of continuity. And if I don't have a lot in common with them now, that itself is interesting information - how much two people's paths can diverge from having been in roughly the same place in 1983.

Some of them? We've gone through some shit together and we can connect and reflect on that.

Some are mathematicians. Some are carpenter's wives.

iirc one of the very first people I met online whom I tried to friend on Facebook was the table is the table, and he was like "I'm sorry, do I know you?" lol

Another false conclusion: that one cannot both be happy for the person they met in a bar once and also have the focus and attention for five good friends, and recognize that difference.

Like it is a completely false dichotomy that one either chooses “social media and parasocial interactions” or “real in depth friendships”.

Yes! Just literally enjoy having self determination and agency and do what you want. Tell people you don’t remember them if you’re uncomfortable or just be the level of interested in other people that you want to be. And it will be different on different days. Just, like, live your life.

I feel like I'm hallucinating typing these words onto this message board full of people whose children I have literally watched grow up on Facebook and astonishingly it hasn't stopped me from also having irl friends as much as I want lol

I'm a little more open to speculation that maybe we aren't, like...adjusted...to focusing on so many people's faces so intently? But then ppl have been living in cities and in crowded communities since idk farming and money were invented so while there might be something there about beauty standards and our expectations for things that we see on screens/in media, it's not going to be just a surface level "Human beings weren't meant to look at so many of each other; smaller groups of people such as the nuclear family are the correct amount of people" kind of statement.

once again i’m sorry that i have shared

I mean it's ok to have differing feelings on this subject? Not everything has a consensus and that's fine.

Social media was huge for me between 2007 - 2012 because it helped me become social by initiating conversations I was too chickenshit to initiate in person due to severe social anxiety. I actually had ny healthiest serious relationship ever begin as an innocuous FB message.

Over time that helped me actually be able to be sociable without the social media crutch (only for the pandemic and the PTSD of 2020-2024 to immediately destroy it but that's a me problem).

These days I shrunk my circle because I'm wounded and struggling, When I was happier before all the damage, I kept up with everyone. Now it's hard for me to hold convos with people outside my closest friends so that translates to me also not following them online.

But I don't think my way is the right way, it's just right...for me

I often question what I am doing looking at this message board almost daily for a decade+. I do condemn para-social engagement, engagement that screens have obviously amplified. I am out of the social media game, and have rationalised that I am here for the little cultural trails it can lead me down. But do I really need directions at this point? And why would I click on this thread if I was just looking for recs and criticism? Sure, there is value in social criticism, but I don't think that's why I am here. I am here to see the character portraits continue to play out in a way that has come predictable as it would for anyone seeing a *usernamehere* post everyday for a decade. Something tells me that's a sign of a rotted brain. I wouldn't mind being more ascetic about this, but I have yet to definitively weigh the scales. Someday!

Peace and strength to you Neanderthal

i do think that sometimes maybe we aren't supposed to be soooo instantaneously connected to each other all the time bc i feel like i spend a lot of time being anxious about unreturned texts but maybe everyone spent months or years in anxious fugues about unreturned letters back in the day. then again idk if i'd argue against the development of the telephone, which texting is just an extension of

Before electronic communication, it was easier because you'd go hours per day where you couldn't be contacted, and people contacted you less often, so when you got home, you checked your answering machine, and if someone called, you got back to them when you could, if not right away, but there was an expectation of delay.

Even emails, there wasn't generally the expectation of immediate response because the idea was still that of it was earth-shattering, you'd call. Plus you had to be near a computer to access it.

Smartphones kinda wrecked it all. Now you have texting AND access to the entire internet and voicemail so it has expanded the expectation of availability. Most people are glued to their phones through the day, and people also tend to text you more often than they emailed or called due to the ease of access.

So it's like, whereas pre-smartphones, you would only get a handful of contacts to respond to but during your time out of the house, were free to dedicate 100% attention to what you were doing, now if you have your smartphone on you, you have to proactively decide to ignore messages if you need your attention to be undivided.

I don't think that's a challenge for lots of people, but people with people-pleasing tendencies and OCD like me, it was harder. I'd struggle with having "open tasks" (aka responding) and respond right away, which set the expectation to everyone that o always respond immediately.

Had to retrain myself to take my time to respond to unimportant messages and leave responding to when I'm free and my attention is not divided - it still drives my senses nuts sometimes but it's made for a happier existence, plus most of my friends understand boundaries (and if they don't, I gave them a dressing down or stopped talking to them).

But I'll listen to some friends vent about other friends and how they "left them on read" and "oh this is so shitty, they're online RIGHT NOW but can't respond to me?"

and it seems so miserable to me to have the expectation of other people that they're on-call 24/7, like reading the message automatically means the person is in a good place to respond to it immediately, that some imaginary timer starts ticking immediately.

Obviously intentionally leaving people hanging on important things repeatedly isn't a good thing, but otoh, if you msg a friend 25 times a day about things, 95% of it dumb stuff, perhaps assume that 10 other people are doing the same to them and forgive them that they don't want to spend the entirety of their day msging back and forth.

I've seen actually fights break out and friendships end over it, which was more amusing to me than anything because it meant said friendship was probably teetering on a cliff the entire time.

I recently reread My Antonía and reflected on how much the "women talking over the back fence" would have been an information and communications network for our great-grandparents.

Did you hear that Malachi's cattle have the hoof-and-mouth? And I think your Clarissa should get a stern talking-to about her skirt lengths.

xp my impatient elderly MIL will call or text and if it’s not answered immediately she goes straight into “WHERE ARE YOU?!?” mode and I’m polite about it but mentally I think “IT’S NONE OF YOUR DAMN BUSINESS.”